Wondering if colleague did this on purpose

[WilloWhisperer]

Today I had an important meeting arranged which I have been organising since July. In the end I rearranged my schedule to work today (I work for this company and have my own small business where I usually see clients on a Friday so had a lot of logistics to arrange).

The meeting was at 12 and so our senior consultant wanted me to go through some things in the morning. I told our whole team where I would be, asking them to get me when the people I was expecting had arrived.

The layout is a line of offices which are tucked away. The senior consultant and I had the door shut as we were discussing confidential information, furthest away from the entrance. There is a junior colleague who always huffs that she has to show people where these particular rooms are (she is sort of part of our team but in a different capacity)

I came out of the office at 12.10 to see if the people I had a meeting with were here yet. No one had got me so I thought they might be late. After a bit of investigating, she said “I looked around and couldn’t find you, so they left”. She said she asked around. But none of my team saw her come up the corridor. All she had to do was ask my whereabouts and any of them would have known where I was/ to come and get me. They were all working with their doors open.

She has form for doing things “to prove a point” so I’m wondering if she has done this on purpose? I don’t know when I/they am going to be able to rearrange and we will probably lose work because of this.

One last thought, OP - if junior colleague feels (rightly or wrongly) that she regularly catches the flak for other people's poor planning - a particular peril of support roles - this may explain her "lean out" mentality and insistence on sticking to the letter of her role. A way of protecting herself from pointed fingers when thinks go wrong.

Blame culture is rarely recognised as such by management but can be pernicious and really undermine morale and proactivity.

OP you should have been there to greet your guests- that is part of yo ur role as organiser.
however, even if displeased your colleague should have gone to more effort to find you and seated your guests in the room. It reflects bad on your entire company and will lose you all work. Your colleague then should have spoken to their manager about being allocated hosting/ greeting duties by her colleagues and how that is not their role.

When I was young I worked reception occasionally for a big, fancy corporation. People would arrive ( meetings would be already listed in a book on my desk) . I would greet them politely and ask them to have a seat. Phone the person they were meeting who would arrive within minutes. And off they went together happily. Your place sounds like chaos ( it's not that you should be waiting in reception). It's if you have a team but no receptionist then one of your team should have been waiting to greet the clients if this was an important meeting.

If she assumed you weren't here because you don't usually work on this day, that's an error, but it's not something done deliberately to "prove a point" as you insinuated in your earlier post.

It does seem odd to be in a tucked away room with the door closed and hard to find at the start of your important meeting - at the very least, you should have made anyone who might encounter the guests before you aware that you are indeed here and where you could be found.

The whole set up seems a bit odd. In every place I’ve worked.

internal: make you’re own way to the pre-booked meeting room on time. Why didn’t you just have your meeting with the senior consultant in the room booked for your meeting so you didn’t have to worry about when they were arriving?

external: sign in at reception and someone goes to collect them - often more junior if you’re in back to back.

If this woman (you don’t like) has a formal role in greeting guests to the floor it was on you to tell her about your meeting and not just assume she’d find you when you’re not normally in.

You are not unreasonable in complaining about your useless colleague. However, you should have started looking for your visitors before 12 noon, if that's when the meeting was. Be in reception to greet them. You fell right into this one, I'm afraid.

The junior person did not have to look hard to usher the people to the meeting. This is a time for management to say to her WTAF were you doing to not summon up an ounce of common sense to at least make a phone call to bring them where they’re supposed to be.

Is it in the junior person’s job description to find you for your own meetings OP? I doubt it. Also why on earth were you answering questions from a senior consultant just before your meeting? You put yourself on do not disturb or tell him you have a meeting and to catch up later.

You’ve made yourself seem quite incompetant on this post

Nothing that OP did was wrong. I'd definitely be having words with the woman who couldn't find you, but I'd also want to know why the people coming for the meeting left so soon. What was said to make them leave?

Usher them where?

The junior person apparently didn't have any knowledge of the meeting, where the meeting was taking place, or that OP was in on this Friday in contrast to her usual 4 day schedule. OP was away from her own desk (and phone) and in behind a closed door at the end of an out of the way hallway.

OP couldn't be bothered to communicate the most basic information to this person to enable them to help her out with her meeting, and yet now that things have gone wrong suddenly it's all this admin's fault.

OP you are very conveniently forgetting to respond to posts asking you specific questions eg why you didn't prepare for the visitors by a) excusing yourself at 11.55am b) delegate the responsibility of greeting the visitors to a specific person c) the distance they travelled to see you d) why they left so quickly without attempting to phone you e) why you didn't politely approach the junior floating admin to explain that you were in the office on your usual day off because you came in specifically to meet the visitors and ask for her help when they arrived f) failing that why you didn't ask whoever buzzed them into the building to ring your mobile so you would know immediately that they were there.

If you are generally so disorganised, I'm not surprised it took four months to arrange a meeting.

Did you tell this woman that you were actually on site, contrary to your usual schedule?
Did you tell her that you had important meeting delegates arriving for a noon meeting with you?
Did you tell her where you could be found, not in your usual office or in the planned meeting room?
Did you tell the person you were talking to past the time the meeting was meant to start that you had a scheduling clash?

OP they left because they were told you were not there as you don't work Fridays. The junior told them this and it was the truth as far as she was aware - because YOU failed to inform her otherwise.

What information and instructions did you leave with your junior colleague? Even a quick I’m expecting xyz at 12. I’m going into a meeting with SC now so ping me on Teams when they arrive. I’ve got room 1.2 booked so take them there please.

Did you do any of that type of thing?

Sounds like these clients were looking for an excuse to ditch the meeting. Sorry OP.

She didn't do well (the junior person). But, if this meeting was so important you should have informed your immediate team AND the junior huffy person "who is sort if part if the team but not really" you were expecting X at noon, and you would be in Y room. You also should've pre-empted the senior consultant running on and on by telling him at the start of the meeting you would be stopping at 11.50am to go meet your guests. Alarm on phone and off to reception.

It is weird the clients left so quickly and does sound possible the junior has sent them away/said you weren't in. No doubt you will find out on Monday. I'd delay reporting her until I found out what exactly had happened at the encounter. If she's done something deliberately malicious she deserves a written warning. If it's the case you didn't explicitly tell her and the client simply left feeling insulted, ghat's on you.

@WilloWhisperer can you just answer the question you are seemingly avoiding… Did you tell this woman you had a meeting and the guests would be arriving and to come and find you or send them to a conference room/office?

YES or NO??

This is really crucial to whether you are unreasonable or not.

This sort of thing isn’t a bad thing to do if it fits with other aspects of the office (like what hours people keep), because it can make it quicker to get hold of you when your guests turn up and make the process smoother for everyone.

But no one should need to have been told that sort of thing to do their best to facilitate visitors to an office getting to see the person they’re supposed to.

If you had a very important meeting at 12pm that you'd spent months organising, then why on earth did you let a previous meeting go on until 10 minutes into this meeting!

You should have been ready to greet the attendees at about 11.50.

I don't think you can blame anyone else in this situation...

This might be true in some circumstances. But OP doesn't usually work at this company on Fridays and these were internal people not clients. That combined with this person not actually being a receptionist changes the balance IMO. OP was really remiss in not communicating with this rotating admin or just arranging a specific meeting space that these visitors could ask to be directed to instead of expecting them to stand around while someone with no advanced warning went and tracked OP down.

Someone coming by from another department and asking for OP and the admin saying "OP doesn't work on Fridays actually" is not particularly unreasonable.

I agree OP needed to inform admin she was in and expecting visitors. All sounds very disorganised.

Maybe OP has been disingenuous and it’s normal for the people she was meeting to pop in to her office but if not internal people from another location who don’t normally visit aren’t the same as a colleague popping in from the office one floor down. And maybe the normal process at her office is for the admin people who sit near the entrance to be informed of visitors in advance and of changes to people’s schedules, etc. and to not know what to do if they aren’t Or maybe it’s process to only direct visitors to rooms they ask for and otherwise assume the visitor is just chancing it.

But it sounds like the normal process, while not documented specifically in the job descriptions, is for the admin staff there to act like receptionists when it comes to visitors and facilitate them meeting the person they’re supposed to meet. And I wouldn’t expect someone in that role to need to be told any of the details suggested by the previous poster in order to say something like “That’s odd, OP isn’t normally in on Fridays, but could you just wait there a moment and I’ll see what’s going on.”

I think two things can both be true at once:

This junior person who rotates through the department could have done more to attempt to track OP down
and
OP was the one who was responsible for this very important (to her) meeting and failed to take several key and obvious steps to prevent confusion and enable the more junior person to help OP

Being senior should mean additional accountability and a focus on setting more junior team members up for success. But based on this thread OP's reaction is to throw the admin under the bus and ignore her her own role.

Obviously this woman sounds incompetent but I don’t understand why you would run meetings back to back, without at least a 10 minute buffer to stretch your legs, have a comfort break, and mentally prepare for the next one? Plus accommodating any over run, especially if you know this senior consultant couldn’t easily be ‘wrapped up’ at bang on 12.

I don’t think she does sound incompetent as she’s NOT a receptionist. She may do perfectly well at the job she’s actually paid to do,

You didn’t even inform her that you were in the office that day, let alone having visitors, so yeah I can see it just going “oh Willo doesn’t work Fridays”. Could she have done more - yes probably, but you’ve put all the barriers in the way - not telling her you were coming, being tucked away in the out of the way office, not being around at the start time, not reconfirming arrangements with your guests etc.